Black screen of death!? 14 replies

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My aunty gave me a ring this morning (Im the comp tech man in the family) because she said she changed something in windows security settings and is now stuck of a black screen with only a cursor present, restarting to safe mode is the only thing we tried over the phone with no luck, I have no Idea why its done this and never come across a Black Screen before so I need some help.

I'm thinking its one of two things ram or most likely HDD failing but not sure until of go over or pull the drive out.

If anyone knows the problem or has had it before help would be greatly appreciated.

So I took out ram and just put one stick in and same problem and I have taken the HDD out and in an external and now its in my computer and shows up and seems to be working fine so now I'm quite stumped. I guess it has to be a video card issue then??

Have you checked the BIOS/CMOS of your aunt's computer? In many cases, a PC booting to a black screen with cursor indicates that the boot order is out of whack or that a data cable/power cable was loose and didn't identify that the HDD was present, or something along those lines.

Kwould;5472993Have you checked the BIOS/CMOS of your aunt's computer? In many cases, a PC booting to a black screen with cursor indicates that the boot order is out of whack or that a data cable/power cable was loose and didn't identify that the HDD was present, or something along those lines.

Yes and yes, checked them both and hard drive is visible as a master drive

Can i ask what OS is it?
Secondly i have encountered this before with my father's PC and it was before the login screen he had Vista at the time it would sit there with a black screen and the cursor you could move around just fine didn't lag like windows was loading anything we never found a fix besides reformat. I tried many things like run Ccleaner and fix up the registry and disable all start up items with no avail. So we left the PC like that for about two years we got used to it. Anyway the ruff amount of time it would stay on the black screen was 2 minutes. I hope that helps if not it was a useless rant.

I've had a black screen a few times after running windows updates. Is it possible something related to a corrupt file or something? I guess I'm not quite sure from your post, does the screen stay black or does it eventually get to the desktop?

^ That was my avenue of thinking too. A dead CMOS battery would cause a black screen as well.

Some questions in order to better help you:

Does your aunt know exactly what security settings she was configuring when it happened? Did it just blank out while she was working, or after she started it up later? When you say cursor, do you mean blinking block/line, or mouse pointer? (Some use those two descriptions synonymously.) And last but not least, does it get through POST and the pre-boot sequence or does it do nothing at all?

Alright well I only left it for about a Min on the black screen so not sure if it ends up booting through, so ill check that out.

And its running Win 7 Ult, Ive read on a few sites that service pack 1 may cause this?!

@Omen

I reset BIOS to defaults but not reset from CMOS, so ill give that a try too.
I looked at temps and everything was fine there.

@kwould

She wasnt to sure after I got there and asked her, Im thinking if it was the windows update it would of reset itself then it happened but im not sure. Its your mouse pointer and can move it around the screen still and yes it gets through post fine and has the win logo loading icon then it goes black.

jimbo_0002;5473233She wasnt to sure after I got there and asked her, Im thinking if it was the windows update it would of reset itself then it happened but im not sure. Its your mouse pointer and can move it around the screen still and yes it gets through post fine and has the win logo loading icon then it goes black.

Is she on XP by any chance? I go that happening after a critical update once that installed a half dozen or so updates not long ago. I had to format to resolve it. Some try and do a MBR repair, but the way I figure if it gets that bad might as well format.

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